Mozilla IT & Operations

ANNOUNCEMENT: Data Center Consolidation

Mozilla IT has data centers all over the world; in China, The Netherlands, Phoenix, Santa Clara and Mountain View.

Many of these locations are subject to Daylight Saving Time where the time shifts ahead an hour in the Spring and shifts back an hour in the Fall. This causes all sorts of havoc with computers and makes it very difficult to schedule meetings with such a large and geo-distributed team. Someone‘s always having to take a meeting in the middle of the night.

In Q2, in order to provide the best service for Mozillians, Mozilla IT will be moving our entire infrastructure to one location in the South Pacific to Pacific Republic of Kiribati (UTC+14), a small island nation in Oceania.

This move will take some coordination, but we have been working with the government and Telecom Services Kiribati Limited to make sure the transition is smooth. Says Derek Moore, Mozilla’s Data Center Operations Manager, “Kiribati’s tropical location will provide a large amount of sunlight necessary for Mozilla’s new solar powered data center.”

Other than the obvious benefits of consolidation, we chose Kiribati for two reasons:

Kiribati does not do any time changes for Daylight Saving Time.

Kiribati is at the highest time zone. It is the first time zone to see a new day. We feel that this represents Mozilla IT’s commitment to using new technologies to brighten everyone’s day.

This small island nation sees the first light of day and Mozilla IT will literally be on the bleeding edge. As I’ve said, “the web moves fast, and Mozilla needs to move fast too.”